


and i yet stand firm against my love

by getbreqed



Category: Harrow the Ninth, The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers, Reverse Narrative, but also lovers, enemies and still enemies, implied sex, misgendering in the third one because they don't know each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:54:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25723174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getbreqed/pseuds/getbreqed
Summary: How Wake and Pyrrha could have been or could have come to be, before the fall. Told before all three lived to regret it, in reverse order.
Relationships: Pyrrha Dve/Wake Ye Remembrance of Ye Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pa Snap Back to Reality etc, SPOILERS FOR HARROW THE NINTH
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	1. at last now we again see each other plain

Wake ducks and rolls, uncaring of the scrapes down her side and the bruise on her hip from being thrown into the wall, hard. Her baton snaps out and catches the lyctor behind the knees, coming up so her gun rests under -

-her chin, as she comes face to face with her enemy, whose eyes are no longer green.

“It’s you,” Wake says.

“It’s me,” she says. She slowly opens her hand and her sword drops to the ground with a clatter and rolls on the ground. Wake doesn’t move her gun.

“I don’t know if I want to kill you any less than I want to kill him.” Wake says. “I don’t want to kill you any less than I want to kill him.”

“You shouldn’t,” she says.

“I don’t,” Wake says.

She looks at Wake with eyes that are not her own. “I need to kill you too. My duty hasn’t changed, and neither has yours. If your fervor, if your faith were malleable, I don’t know if I would still love you as I love you.”

Wake hates, in the moment where she drops her gun and kisses Pyrrha, she hate and she hates, she is incandescent with rage.

“I hate you,” she says into her mouth.

“You are my enemy,” Pyrrha replies, low, face in her neck and mouth at her collarbone.

“No, fuck you, you know what I mean, you know that I - “

“I know you, Commander,” Pyrrha says, and Wake hates how she takes delight in the smile in her voice. “My commander. I have tracked you over stars, over empty space - you are with me, Wake, and I know you, even if I’m unsure of everything else.”

“Every time I see you I wish I never saw you again,” wake gasps. “It would be a fucking mercy, it would be an - ah”

“It would be an honor,” says Pyrrha. “It is a personal failing for the both of us, each time I see you and you see me and we both live. It is a surrender neither of us can stand.”

Wake rallies and pulls her where she wants her. “If this is a surrender, I’m damn well getting everything I can out of it. I don’t do anything by half measures.”

“Well, my Commander, neither do I.”


	2. your hands are not your own, soaked in your own heart's blood

“So that’s it. It’s true. I’ve been - the reason that you’ve been so motherfucking weird about-“ she cuts herself off and uncharacteristically turns away to bang a fist savagely against the wall. 

Wake is always careful not to show her back to the enemy. Pyrrha wants to touch her there, fit her (his) hand at the back of her shoulder, to be trusted to watch the hand that is hers right now trace the soft space between shoulder blade and vertebrae.

She keeps her hand where it is, over the close cluster of gunshot wounds in her gut, now long healed, the only traces of them the pieces of bloody fabric under her hand. She doesn’t get up from where she’s sitting down, leaning against the opposite corridor wall.

Wake turns back around and looks at her wild-eyed before starting to pace back and forth.

“And it would hurt you too if I cut him down by inches, I suppose, if you’re still - attached.” She pauses. “He is the one who killed you, isn’t he?”

Pyrrha nods, *yes,* and wake goes back to pacing. “The bullets from that - thing, they get him, they get all necros, but they don’t get you, and that’s it that’s the point, I can do something with that-“

“Commander,” Pyrrha says, and she reaches out with her bloody hands and catches Wake’s hand in hers, surprising her into looking at her, gun held shockingly loose in her other hand. 

“When you kill him, kill him quick, as a favor to me, because I loved him and he loved me and killing me killed a part of him so big I was able to live among the rubble.”

She stands and reaches to cup Wake’s face, leaving her other hand in Wake’s, her sword lying on the floor. Wake’s mouth still remained stubbornly set. “He killed me because it was his duty. He killed me because it was the right thing to do. He killed me because I said yes, because I’d known I would say yes before he even asked.”

She runs her thumb over Wake’s cheekbone, the blood on her thumb dry and leaving no streaks. 

“If he had not killed me,” Pyrrha says softly, “then I would never have met you. I have regrets, and I may regret you one day, but to have known you is worth a death twice over, as long as it is by your hand.”

Wake looks at her with her usual iron smoldering resistance and then _snarls_ and drops her gun, reaching forward with both hands and kisses her like she’s trying to bite a real, full life with a real, single soul into her by force.


	3. and we reach out in our blindness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> misgendering of pyrrha in this one because wake doesn't know she exists

He was a grotesque thing of muscle and blood and bone, made and remade again and again no matter how far he was destroyed. Forwards and forwards again, body cracked and broken and destroyed and reforming with wet red snaps and cracks, relentless.

He destroyed the engines of her ship once and left her to put out an emergency beacon to be captured by one of the emperor’s ships. She cannibalised all the remaining systems on the ship including life support and managed to get the engines half limping and had slipped into Blood of Eden territory and disappeared by the time he thought to look back.

He would not make the same mistake again.

The first time they meet in person they’re in her ship because he’s the reanimated corpse assigned to send her to the death that should be his, he’s fighting her with a sword, like that fucker has all his closest wear. The rest of her crew is in bloody heaps on the ground of the ship. If she had more time she’d space them all so he couldn’t put false life into their remains, they were pathetic protection really but anyone deserves that much and dead bodies were a liability in any fight with a necro, not as much with these fucking regenerating lyctors but still.

But she had no time to space them. She was firing on him from a higher tier, rage on her face, heart in her throat and when he looked up at her his face was blank and she almost expected him to make a hook of bone from his arms and pull himself up to her quicker than she could think, try his bloody best to tear her to pieces with his sword and his bare hands.

She shot again and again and he staggered as one got him in the neck. Even as he choked and it healed he began to turn to the stairs and she took the opportunity to retreat to the control room.

She had rigged the ship to blow, just in case this situation occurred. A red button, a self destruct. She didn’t know what that would do to one of the unkillable bastards, but the vaccum of space for sure would fuck them up more than any sort of weaponry. Maybe he’d get stuck out there pulled apart and reforming forever.

The only reason she hesitates with it under her hand is that she knows that the whole reason he’s here, chasing after her, is that if she falls so does her cause. And killing just the one motherfucker is not the final goal, it’s the fucker in charge who needs to fall.

She is young then, so she still hesitates. And then he is around the corner and she needs both hands to shoot.

Killing blows don’t stop him, but he is slowed, and so they’re trapped in a hell of close quarters where she tries to move out of his range and reload and shoot again in the moments where he’s busy dying and he tries to live and die and kill all at the same time.

She gets him, over and over and over again, but he gets her too - a slash across her arm, a scrape over her ankle - and his weapon has the advantage in close quarters and she’s moving slower, limping, bleeding into her shoe, and he’s closing in, and he has a blade at her throat and her gun is under his chin and he leans in and kisses her.

A bolt of desire that is a lot like rage flashes through every cell in her body, and she pulls the trigger.

He falls back to the ground, hole straight up through his chin.


End file.
